 Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all for coming. On behalf of the Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO, we welcome you to the celebration of Nancy Altman's new book on Social Security. I am Thea Lee, president of EPI. And here representing the AFL-CIO is Lauren Rothfarb, who works closely with Nancy as a member of the Federation's retirement security team. We are delighted to have Nancy here with us today. Nancy is a veteran of Social Security wars past and present. As the leader of the Social Security Works and the Strength and Social Security Coalition of which EPI and the AFL-CIO are proud members, Nancy has assembled an impressive team of young activists to defend and expand the program. Just as Nancy pays homage to Social Security's visionaries in her new book, some of which she had the good fortune to work with, she recognizes the work of defending and expanding Social Security is never done. Each generation must inspire and train the next. And part of that is learning from history. In her new book, The Truth About Social Security, The Founder's Words, Revisionist History, Zombie Lies and Common Misunderstandings, Nancy debunks misleading claims about Social Security, including the claim, which has been made since the program's infancy, that Social Security is on the brink of collapse and will not be there for future generations. In fact, Social Security faces a manageable shortfall that can and should be addressed through progressive revenue increases such as scrapping the cap on taxable earnings. This projected shortfall, by the way, is largely due to slow and unequal wage growth, resulting from decades of bad policy decisions, which are very familiar to us here at EPI. Not the result, as some want us to believe, of inexorable demographic trends. Some of the supposed efforts to save Social Security on behalf of young people are often just attempts to close the projected shortfall by cutting benefits or dismantling the program, rather than by raising additional revenue, which is what people, including young people, overwhelmingly prefer. Nancy has long recognized that we need to not only prevent further cuts, but rather expand the program, a policy agenda that she was instrumental in moving from the fringes of polite society a decade ago to a core tenet of the Democratic Party today. And I think it's very fair to say that without Nancy Altman, we would not be looking at next week's launch of a new bicameral, Expand Social Security Congressional Caucus. No one understands the history of social change better than those who have led the struggle. And the most effective activists are those who understand history. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Nancy is both an activist and an historian. She's also a lawyer and a policy wonk who serves on the board of the Social Security Advisory Board. In this book, Nancy debunks the bogus claims made by social security critics by looking to the program's history, and she's gonna talk more about that in a few minutes. She has cleverly positioned herself as an originalist. A popular term in certain political quarters today. As Nancy demonstrates in her book, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his team clearly saw social security as a cornerstone on which to build a cradle to grave system of, quote, assurance against the evils of all major economic hazards for workers, their families, and those unable to work due to old age, disability, and unemployment. Roosevelt and his secretary of labor, Francis Perkins, understood the political reality that such a system had to be built incrementally over time. And so today, despite the fact that social security is our nation's most successful and popular government program, the work to fulfill Roosevelt's vision is still arduous. We all know we have our work cut out for us. But I am confident that as long as social security remains the target of anti-government ideologues, we will be able to depend on Nancy Altman for her scholarship, her perseverance, and her passion for economic justice. Without further ado, I'll hand over the podium to Nancy so she can talk to us about her great book. Thank you, Thea, for that wonderful introduction. In today's debate over social security, we hear lots of what I call revisionist history, zombie lies, and common misunderstandings. All three are really captured in the famous quip. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. That's what my book is about. Having been privileged to have known three founders personally, and having written a book on the history of social security, I wrote this book to set the record straight, but also to shine a spotlight on the founder's bold vision, a vision that still has not yet been fully achieved. I decided to bring out the truth about social security by quoting what the founders themselves said in reports, speeches, oral histories, and elsewhere. Many of the founders are well-known to history, pictured on the cover are Franklin Roosevelt and Francis Perkins. Others are well-known to social security scholars. Also pictured on the cover is Arthur Altmaier, who was nicknamed Mr. Social Security by Franklin Roosevelt, and has a building named after him at the Social Security Administration Headquarters in Baltimore. But many founders weren't even well-known in their own day. A number of the founders were women. Let me describe just a few of them, the ones I mentioned by name in my book. Pictured on the cover of the book and in the center of this slide is Francis Perkins. She was the first woman ever appointed to a presidential cabinet. She still holds the record as the longest serving secretary of labor, having served from 1933 to 1945. When then-president-elect Roosevelt asked her to serve in his cabinet, she said she would only accept if he would agree to push her priorities, which included what today we know as social security. He agreed to do that, and so she accepted his offer. So in 1934, when Roosevelt created the Cabinet-level Committee on Economic Security to develop the social security legislation, she was the obvious choice to chair it. She was a driving force in its success. The committee that was set up had a number of working groups. Another remarkable woman pictured to your immediate left of Perkins on the slide was Barbara and Noctriebe Armstrong. She headed the working group on old age security. Armstrong was the first female tenured law professor in the United States. She was also a PhD economist. She taught at the law school as well as in the economics department at Berkeley. Without Armstrong, there probably would not have been a social security program, certainly not the one we have today. Let me give you just one story from my first book, The Battle for Social Security, to highlight her importance. The big concern about the legislation was whether the Supreme Court would strike it down as unconstitutional. Everyone thought that joint federal state programs had the best chance to survive a constitutional challenge. That, of course, is a structure of what became the unemployment insurance and the various welfare programs that were created in the Social Security Act. But Armstrong was convinced that social security had to be a federal program. The idea of a mobile workforce, having to deal with a number of different states at retirement and all the administrative complexities, convinced her that anything else would be unworkable. But there was a lot of resistance. She engaged in numerous heated discussions with the general counsel and others about the constitutionality of what she wanted to propose. And one of those arguments, which it's important to know, occurred on a Friday afternoon, the general counsel claimed that the leading constitutional scholar of the day, Thomas Reed Powell, who was an esteemed professor at the Harvard Law School, the general counsel said it agreed with him that her approach couldn't be done. Well, it turned out Armstrong was friends with Powell. And this was a Friday afternoon. So that Friday night after work, she took an overnight train to Boston. She did not tell any of her colleagues she was doing this. She spent the weekend with Powell and his wife and returned to work on Monday morning with a letter from Powell stating that he believed the constitution would allow what she wanted. And of course, she prevailed and the court did indeed uphold social security as constitutional. Another founding member, Evelyn Burns, worked on the employment opportunities working group of the committee. I consider her the meek moracy of the early days. She taught economics at Columbia and was a leading social security scholar. She wrote three major books on social security and defended it for decades. To your immediate right of Frances Perkins is Mary Dooson, who was a suffragist and political activist. She headed the, I'm gonna grab my water, I think I'm losing my voice. Dooson headed the women's division of the Democratic National Committee. She worked successfully to make women a major part of the Democratic constituency. She used social security and other parts of the New Deal to turn out the women's vote in record numbers. She explained her approach this way. We don't make the old fashioned plea to the women that our nominee is charming and all that. We appeal to the intelligence of the country's women. Ours were economic issues and we found the women ready to listen. In 1934, she served on the advisory council of the Committee on Economic Security. After the legislation was enacted, she became a Senate confirmed member of the Three Person Social Security Board which administered social security. And finally, Ellen Woodward, who was considered the second most powerful woman appointee in the Roosevelt administration. She worked closely with Harry Hopkins from 1933 to 1938. Hopkins was one of the five members of the Committee on Economic Security and was closely aligned with Perkins as the most progressive. During Woodward's time at the work progress administration, which is where she worked during that period, she created white collar jobs for destitute Americans, including more than 400,000 women. Woodward succeeded Ducan at the Social Security Board and was there from 1938 until 1946 when the board was replaced with a single commissioner. These women and the other founders had a bold vision. That vision is probably stated best in a 1938 speech by Mary Ducan. The speech entitled This Social Security, What Is It? is repeated in almost its entirety in the first chapter of my book. So what is it? Ducan and the other founders recognized that security, whether physical or economic, is best achieved through cooperative collective action implemented through our government. They understood the phrase social security to be synonymous with economic security. That includes what she describes as, quote, national responsibility for the well-being of children. That national responsibility includes among other things, ensuring that children are educated. Once grown and educated, we must have guaranteed good-paying jobs protected with a minimum wage, maximum hours, and the right to collectively bargain. Our earnings must be protected with insurance against loss in the event of unemployment, short and long-term disability, death, and old age. We must have safe, decent housing. And they recognize that all of us to be economically secure, to have social security in their words, must have guaranteed health insurance and paid medical leave. That bold vision of what social security means is what makes some of the revisionist history so ridiculous. Syndicated columnist Robert Samuelson, for example, and a column entitled, would Roosevelt recognize today's social security? Claims, social security has evolved into something he never intended and actively opposed. In that statement, Samuelson is referring to a narrow question about how the program is financed. But on both the specific point and the general point, his answer is wrong. Roosevelt and the other founders would unquestionably recognize social security. But they would wonder why we hadn't done more to build on what Roosevelt called, quote, a cornerstone of a structure which is being built, but is by no means complete. They thought what we call Medicare for All and paid medical leave, for example, were in Doosan's words, already on the horizon. So with that as a backdrop, let me describe just one example of what I call revisionist history, one zombie lie and one column misunderstanding. It is revisionist history to believe that social security was intended to be part of a three-legged stool, never intended as more than a foundation of support that would be supplemented by employer plans and savings. In fact, there is strong evidence of just the opposite. The founders were visionary, but they were clear-eyed. They recognized the problems with relying on employers and savings for secure and guaranteed retirement income. In fact, activists fighting for social security were hostile to employer pensions, seeing them as employer devices to control workers and believing them to be inherently insecure. The Committee on Economic Security shared the act of a skeptical view of private pensions. A staff report reads, quote, the half-century of experience with voluntary pension plans has shown that they have been inefficient and inadequate as a sound social insurance measure. Viewed as a means of providing security to industrial workers in old age, they are wholly inadequate, nor do they give promise of substantially adequate protection in the future. Social insurance with a far broader coverage is essential to old age security. It's important to know that the three-legged stool metaphor wasn't coined until 1949. The person who coined the image was an executive with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had a stake in selling private sector annuities that supplemented social security. At the time the metaphor was coined, it was an adequate, accurate description. Because of World War II and that a Republican-controlled Congress, social security benefits had not been increased for a decade and so had eroded substantially in value. During that same period, private pensions had become an attractive mechanism to avoid taxes. And during World War II, with its wage and price controls, the permitted deferred compensation, workers had become used to receiving private pensions as substitutes for current wages and unions aggressively bargained for them. So as a simple description of circumstances at that time, it was true that the minimal social security benefits would have to be supplemented for workers that have any hope of receiving adequate retirement income. But it is revisionist history to say that the metaphor reflects the intent of the founders that social security should provide benefits that are minimal and require supplementation. Now on to a zombie lie, that social security's reserves contain nothing but IOUs that Congress had already spent the money. I call it a zombie lie because it has been claimed and refuted regularly over social security's 83-year history. It was first used by Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential campaign. After the election, a social security advisory council was created. It consisted of 23 members, five representing business, five labor and 13 the general public. The advisory council issued its report in December 1938, but felt compelled to issue a unanimous statement about the IOU claim the May before its report stating that the council quote, deems it advisable to make a public statement at this time to allay unwarranted fears. This relates to the method of handling the funds collected for old age insurance purposes. The statement concluded, the members of the council, regardless of differing views on other aspects of the financing of old age insurance, are of the opinion that the present provisions regarding the investment of the monies in the old age reserve account do not involve any misuse of these monies or endanger the safety of these funds. But this was a zombie lie. So another advisory panel in 1948, just 10 years later refuted it again. And then another in much more detail in 1959. And of course, we keep hearing the same zombie lie today. One of the founders was Bob Myers who remains the longest serving chief actuary in the history of the program. He died in 2010. Starting in the 1980s, he became increasingly concerned that young people especially were losing confidence in the future of social security. He fought in numerous ways large and small to correct the misinformation and seek to restore confidence in the program. In the 1990s, when Treasury was changing from the issuance of paper bonds to simply electronic transactions, he convinced Congress to mandate the Treasury continue to produce and issue paper bonds to social security. And Congress did what he asked. He thought that there would be greater confidence if there were actual paper instruments. Here's what they look like. I believe social security is the only entity in the world that still gets a paper record of purchases. These are not casual promises to pay. Every purchase and redemption is carefully tracked and reported in every trustees report. Part values, interest rates, maturity rates are all carefully tracked and reported. These bonds have the same legal status as Treasury bonds issued to the public. If Treasury ever did not repay one of these bonds, that would be a government default. But this is a zombie lie, so not likely to die anytime soon. And here's a common misunderstanding that our aging population has made social security unaffordable. That the wealthiest nation in the world at the wealthiest moment in its history all of a sudden can no longer afford social security. But as the following two slides show, our social security system is unquestionably affordable. The first one shows that at the end of the 21st century, social security will cost as a percent of GDP, not much more than it costs today. The cost is basically a straight horizontal line. And the second slide shows that other industrialized countries spend considerably more today as a percentage of GDP than we will at the end of the century. Despite the common misunderstanding, the issue of whether to expand or cut social security is not a question of affordability. It's a question of values, ones the American people overwhelmingly share. Expanding social security is profoundly wise policy and winning politics, a powerful combination. It's time to expand social security as the founders envisioned. The founders were visionary, but they were also pragmatic. In his message to Congress on January 17, 1935, transmitting the proposed legislation to Congress, President Roosevelt cautioned, it is overwhelmingly important to avoid any danger of permanently discrediting the sound and necessary policy of federal legislation for economic security by attempting to apply it on two ambitious scale before actual experience has provided guidance for the permanently safe direction of such efforts. The place of such a fundamental in our future civilization is too precious to be jeopardized now by extravagant action. 83 years after those words, social security has now stood the test of time. It is time to increase its modest benefits and add more protections, time to improve Medicare and expand it to everyone, time to add paid family leave and medical leave and time to enact other protections as well. As we work to expand social security, we must know where we are headed. We must have a beacon to guide our path and we must be armed with facts to refute the revisionist history, zombie lies and common misunderstandings. To provide that beacon and those facts is why I wrote the truth about social security. I hope those of you who are able to read the book enjoy it as much as I enjoyed reading it. Thank you. I'm Marilyn Park, American Federation of Government Employees. Very much want to see the future that you are hoping we can see and hoping maybe what do you think that some of the, in the middle of everything we're dealing with perhaps some of the renewed interest in working people and the new candidates focusing on that might help refocus where we are in social security again. I don't know if you're feeling hopeful for the same reasons. I actually feel, I actually do believe, it's a trait to say about our crossroads because everything we care about including all the federal workforce and everything's being attacked. And of course, the Republicans are so eager to go after what they social security, Medicare and Medicaid. I couldn't believe that the ink wasn't even dry on the tax bill and Marco Rubio, they all started saying, now okay, we got to go after these. On the other hand, I am feeling hopeful because there was, I think the Democrats really took a detour. I think they lost their way in the 1990s with the era of big government is over and all that and looking at market-based solutions and all that sort of stuff. And I actually have this in my book but it's really worth looking at and you can find it online. To compare the 2012 Democratic and Republican presidential platforms, the Plancon Social Security and the 2016 one. Because the 2012 one was we need a bipartisan solution. We've got to save social security and the main talk was about private savings accounts on both plans. So to the casual reader, it didn't surprise me that you couldn't vote on that issue because they sounded the same. But in 2016, the Democratic Party came out strongly for expand social security. And in fact, there are about a dozen bills in the House and Senate that have been introduced that expand social security and restore it to long-range economic actuarial balance. A leading one was introduced by Congressman John Larson of Connecticut. He, if you can believe it, it's called the 2100 Act because it keeps social security solvent through 2100 and beyond and expands the benefits. If you can believe it, it has 172 co-sponsors. They're only 193 Democrat. Keep trying to get a Republican but so far they're all Democratic co-sponsors. If there is the blue wave, if the Democrats do retain control of, or take control rather of the House, a wishful thinking here, take control of the House. He'll be chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee. And he's already said that he'll hold hearings on expanding keys. One of the co-chairs of the expand Social Security Caucus that's having their unveiling on September 13th. So if people get out and vote and the Democrats take the House, I think they will move forward and the Republicans will be on the defensive and have to decide what they're gonna do. If they don't, I think 2019 is especially Medicare and Medicare gonna be way under attack because they'll know they might not keep the White House and so forth. So I'm hopeful, but it's the message everybody's gotta get a, you have to sort of climb over glass. You gotta vote no matter what. We have to ask questions. Carl Polzer, and I've been working on wealth concentration and inequality issues for several years. I have a website called the Center on Capital and Social Equity. I'm a little concerned. I agree that Social Security should be improved and it's essential. But the politics where it's either or, it's either we don't wanna expand pensions because we'd rather expand Social Security. I think it gets in the way of, you have to do both. I mean, half the people have no retirement savings. It's essential. That's where a lot of the inequality and capital growth is occurring, is in those accounts. I think some of the tax subsidy should be taken out of the system. Employer provided pensions and put into a tax, fundable tax credit for everybody. So I think that, I just like to see kind of work on both. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I think the fundamental problem is if you don't, if you have money to save, that you can't save. I mean, everybody should save. But people don't even have money for short term kinds of things, much less lock up their savings for 40 years. So in the 1920s, when we had this kind of income and wealth inequality, because I agree with you and President Obama said it was the challenge of our times. That what we did was we created the minimum wage. We gave workers the right to collectively bargain and we enacted Social Security, which helped to create the middle class. It's very redistributive. And what we should be doing now, I think, is we should definitely fight for 15 for sure, increase the minimum wage, definitely restore workers' rights to collectively bargain, really strengthen those rights and expand without cut Social Security. And if we make very wealthy pay their fair, what I consider their fair share of a pay more, that will do, that will at least slow the growth. I mean, it's not gonna reverse the growth, but everyone should have, if it's possible to save, everybody should save. But to be able to save, you have to have enough income. Student debt is another issue. If you're coming out of school with this ridiculous amount of debt, we can't expect people to put money away for 40 years for retirement when they have student debt. So I think they all go together and what we've got to do is have a fair distribution of the productivity. The country's quite productive. It's just been unfairly divided. Owen Haga, Jo and Economic Committee. Speaking of the history of Social Security in the larger social insurance world, do you have any thoughts on the expansion that did happen to DI and whether those two programs kind of gain or lose from the fact that we think of them kind of in one breath always? Well, I mean, DI, you know, despite McMoveny, it is the Social Security Disability Insurance. Exactly, yeah, yeah. It's a single formula. And in fact, if you expand, well, yeah, if you expand benefits for one part of it, it's a single formula. So if you expand benefits, it'll be increases for people who get retirement benefits but also survivor and disability benefits. There's actually, and this isn't really exactly what you're asking. So I want to make sure I answer your question, but there's a really interesting thing going on right now with disability insurance that no one really can, the actuaries at least can explain. There are a lot of theories about it, but that is that the number of applications has really fallen off and they keep expecting it to come back. So as you know, there are these two separate trust funds. Actually, the Larson Bill combines the two trust funds into one, which I think is the way it should be done. But they're currently two separate trust funds. The DI trust fund was scheduled to be exhausted, depleted in 2016. There was that fix that was done when Boehner retired that had to go to 2022 without any other change in the law. The next year, the trustees report had it at 2023. The next year, without any change, it was bumped to 2028. This last trustees report that just came out was 2032 and the claims are still off. And there are a lot of theories about it, whether it's office closings that are part because people have more trouble getting to apply or whether it's, even though Congress has mandated an earning statement, there aren't those earning statements so people aren't aware of their benefits or whether it's been kind of the shaming that this program's all full of fraud and it's running amok and all of that has caused people not to, nobody really knows what the answer is, but I think it's a fundamental part of social security. And again, the founders talked about not just long-term disability, but short-term disability because any of us can be struck by an illness or accident and have to have our wages replaced. So I don't know if I'm exactly getting it what you're asking, but okay. Do you realize countries spend on retirement programs with the United States lagging? And I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about why you think Americans are reluctant or less inclined to demand a decent retirement benefit from our government as opposed to say, European. It seemed to be very far behind. It's so interesting. Well, first of all, it's important to recognize that this is just the counterpart benefits for old age security and disability. Those other countries all have universal guaranteed healthcare. They have children's allowances. I mean, they have many more benefits that aren't even captured in that slide because we wanted to make it comparative to our system. You know, it would have been way out of, it would have spent much, much more on GDP. I love that Mary Doosan essay that I talked about social security. What is it? And you don't have to get my book to read it. You can actually find it online if you want. But in it, she has a great line where she says, because the United States, even in 1935, social insurance started in Germany in 1885. And then the other European countries and other countries around the world quickly added programs. So the United States was slow in getting it. And she has a great line which says, it would take a whole book to explain why we were so far behind. And it's the same sorts of things. Some of it is the constitution, at that time the constitution because of limited federal power. But a lot of it is this idea of, it's almost a mythology, limited government, the private sector does everything better. We're on our own. There's a Franklin Roosevelt, another one that I put in the book, I think it was a, I forget exactly the year, one of the State of the Union messages where it's great. He says, the first group to turn to government for protection was business. And he goes through it. And if you think about it, if we didn't have a court system, if we didn't have highways, if we didn't have a military, we'd be in a state of nature. I mean, those are all, they benefit all of us, but they benefit the wealthy more than they benefit the poor. So and he, you know, he, it's really a worth reading. I mean, a lot, what I loved in writing this was reading all of these, in some cases rereading and sometimes reading for the first time, all of these speeches because so many of them just resonated, you know, you say, why doesn't someone give that speech today? It's such a great speech. But I think there is, you know, on the one hand, there is this sense of out, you know, we're all by our own bootstraps and all of that sort of stuff. And it's, you know, you can always call something socialism and that's, and of course social security, that was the claim that it was socialism, but it didn't work for them. But I think that, and the founders all talk about this, that, you know, they really tried to craft a program that had basic American values. So it is that no one gets a benefit unless there's a work record. You know, they're those kinds of things. And so I think they were very clever to create a program that really appeals across the political spectrum. And I think we've got to be creative in what we want to do, but I really do think we're at a moment now because I think people recognize that drug prices are ridiculously high, they're the highest anywhere in the world, that, you know, that we should, that Medicare works extremely efficiently and needs to be improved, but it's much more efficient even though it covers seniors and people with disabilities. And so I think the American people are, I mean, we'll find out in November, we've got a lot of candidates. You know, we've got, some of it is just like the one in Massachusetts yesterday, you know, wanting young energy, but some of it is like Crowley in the Bronx. I mean, that a lot of members are running on Medicare for all. The Sanders bill had basically a who's who of, everybody you can think of who might run for president. It's, they know, they're professional politicians, they get that there's something about that that's resonating for the American people. So this is back to the question of am I optimistic or not? I mean, it would really be the height of irony if the election of Donald Trump issued in a progressive revolution, but it's not out of the question. It is not out of the question. I mean, there's a lot of this room for eight. Anyway, I will stop with that. Hi there, Julie Tiffins also at AFGE. Nancy, we know it's gonna take some political will, that some political victories and then some political will to get rid of the cap and slowly raise the payroll tax, which is what it's gonna take. And we've been talking about this, what used to sound like a far in the future in solvency date that even some learned people in the press sometimes use the word broke in place of insolvency. Do you see a point here? And now it's not very far away. You know, whether it's 2032, 33 or 34, it's not very far away. Do you see a point where Congress needs to understand it's an, oh my God, is that 2025, 2026, that if you don't do this now, there will be disaster in 2032, 33, 34. Yeah, I'm gonna challenge a little bit, the premise. The date, what I think has gone wrong, and it's correct, there's no action-forcing event until 2034, but I do think that what has stood in the way of action before, I mean, there was action in 1977, there was an action in 1983. What I think has prevented the action is this effort to have some kind of plan behind closed doors that is not what the American people want, and it's kind of let's all hold hands and jump off the bridge, except not really jump off the bridge because no one will know who to hold accountable because they'll say, well, I didn't like that part and I didn't like that part. And I should mention on the financing side, eliminating the maximum, which all the bills do. That only turns it into a proportionate tax. That means they're paying the same rate on all their earned income, but most people's income is unearned. It's not progressive. And so I, the late Bob Ball and other founder argued that we should be dedicating the estate tax to Social Security. I mean, there's a lot of wealth out there if we want, depending on how we as a society decide as the fairest way to allocate the cost. But I think that if the Democrats take control, John Larson has already said he'll hold hearings. And I think he's gonna wanna have a vote in committee and if there's a vote on the floor, even if they don't have the Senate, there will be pressure on the Republicans to either vote for an expansion bill, vote against it, which I think would be very unpopular, come up with an alternative, which will be very unpopular. And I think we'll move it along. So I'm not pessimistic that they need something. I think they've been trying to do something the American people don't want, which I think is why expansion is really working. But one other point that I always laugh when I see this, and that is, we gotta act sooner rather than later. It just gets harder if we act later. I do think we should act sooner. And I do hope if the Democrats win the House, they'll be hearings in 2019 for sure. And that will start opening the discussion. And it won't be this, let's save it. It's like, hey, do we wanna expand it? Do we wanna cut it? Let's figure it out and how do we pay for it? Or do we wanna keep it at the same level? But I do laugh because what gets harder is cuts because you have to phase them in. You can't cut some of these benefits right before they're gonna retire. But actually raising taxes you can do next year. I mean, you don't need a lot of land time to increase that. So it gets harder to cut benefits the longer we wait. I do think we should act sooner because one of the things social security historically is provided and should provide as its name suggests is the intangible benefit of security. It's not just cash. It's the sense that I can be an entrepreneur. I can take a risk. I know that this money is there. I know that if something happens to me, I'll get this monthly income that I cannot outlive. And with all the talk of it's not gonna be there. It's going broke. People, you know, there are lots of stories of people against their own economic interest taking benefits as soon as they can because they think the program's going broke. I mean, there should be that sense of security that I think talking about expanding and having an open conversation, not just a Washington speak, let's talk about entitlements, but a public debate, I think. And this again, maybe I'm being optimistic. Well, I guess we'll find out as the years go. What do these bills do? And what is, John Cummings, what are the bills do that you've talked about and what is your position on taxing the social security benefit? Taxing them, oh, that's interesting because you'll be interested in one provision. There are a number of bills. Probably the most prominent are two. One is a bill that was introduced by Senator Sanders that has, I'm across the board, let me say there's a commonality in a lot of them. So virtually all of them that are broad-based, there's some targeted ones like focused on widows or focused in particular based ones. They tend to all have across-the-board benefit increases. They tend to change to a more, what I think is a more accurate consumer price index, the CPIE, for the cost of living adjustment. I think they all raise what is called the special minimum, think of it as the minimum benefit that people get. So the idea is people after a lifetime of work shouldn't retire into poverty. Those are kind of the main, there are others, some restore the student benefit. There are variations in the kinds of benefits increases, but those are the kind of the range of them. And it's interesting given your question that John Larson's bill, this is the only one that does this, is starting in 1983, social security benefits were, if you were over 16,000 or 32,000, your income was, your benefit, a half your benefit was included in taxation for income tax purposes. What Larson's bill does is he increases those thresholds to 50,000 and 100,000. So benefits are taxed now, but he gives tax relief to more beneficiaries. And then there's the other, but then there's the question, those all cost money. And then there's a question, how do you pay for it? And they all, again, they're variations on a theme. Senator Sanders' bill has a threshold of $250,000. So the current cap is at $128,400. It goes up every year. He sort of skips the income between that and 250. And tax is not just earned income, but unearned income. And that extends the, and that ensures the benefits can be paid for about the next 60 years. What John Larson's bill does, he sets, he does the same thing, although it's not unearned income. He taxes just the earned income, starting at $400,000 and above. And he also has a rate increase, the FICA rate, but he phases it in very slowly over 20 years. So it's a 0.05% increase each year. So he talks about it as an average of 50 cents a week. That's what it costs. But so there, again, I think that what the Democrats have coalesced around is that, we're facing a retirement income crisis where too many people aren't gonna be able to retire. So the last thing we wanna do is cut benefits because that's just gonna make the crisis more serious. And that benefits should be expanded. And then, they have different ways of paying for it, although they all seem to be clustering, at least in part, around having those at the very top pay a proportionate rate of their full wages. Oh, well, I think one of the things about salinity, when you start parsing it down and picking favorites and penalizing some people and rewarding others, you lose that universality that is gonna keep it going, that is gonna, in essence, have the support. And so if you could just address, do we have a universal program that applies equally to everyone or not? I agree and there's a fundamental principle in social security and that is the more that you contribute and the more that you earn, the higher your benefit. And all these proposals, the Sanders bill and the Larson bill and all the others, keep that, that is a fundamental principle that makes it what the American people see it as universal and fair. The more you pay in, the more you get out. So the question is, on what level of earnings should you pay the 6.2%? And a lot of people think, I mean, 94% of Americans earn under that. So the question, and most people pay all year long, they get, people have steady jobs, get deductions from their paycheck every pay period. And what this proposal says is, well, at least for the very wealthy, they should get it every all year long, too. So I don't think, I don't see it as affecting, I think you're right, universality is extremely important and what makes it so popular. And I don't think any of these programs, again, it's these benefits go to everyone. They're not means test of benefits at all. They are across the board. All workers would get it and families as well. I think we have time for two more questions up here. Hi, I'm a David Belducci consultant and retired from the US Department of Labor. I have comment and then I have a question in two different areas. I was glad you mentioned non-employment insurance, which is Title III of the Social Security Act. And I wanted to talk about maybe a comment and this understanding about unemployment insurance right now. Many states are reducing the duration of benefits and it has a adverse effect on it as an economic stabilizer. So that's also one of the truths of social security that should be looked at in the next Congress. My question is very simple. What would the Medicare for all program look like? Oh, I'm so glad, I am so glad you asked. Well, let me make a point also about, although about the unemployment insurance part two, that was of course part of the Social Security Act of 1935. Harry Hopkins' view was that the government should guarantee employment, should be an employer of last resort. And so unemployment would just be a temporary bridge from one job to another because there would be employment. And there is starting to be talk in progressive circles about, you know, we've got infrastructure, we've got, it's like back in the 30s, there's a lot that can be done. So it'll be interesting if this progressive revolution materializes if that's in there. But I just blocked on your... Medicare, Medicare for all. Oh, Medicare for all. Here's what, how I've seen... I'm a miniature less. Okay. I'm just kidding. Well, here's a little self-promotion. I'm working on a book, I've started another book called the road to Medicare for all, a call to action. And the way that I am my co-author is envision it is first of all, you got to improve Medicare. There should be, you know, maximum out of pocket and so forth. But the way we see it, and let me say one other thing, and that is now that I'm old enough to have Medicare, in fact, I say this at the beginning of the book, it's eye-opening. You know, when you're 40 and you go to the doctor's office and you stop and you have to pay and fill the forms, you have to send them in. You know, the first time you use your Medicare card, and I do have a gap, so I'm, you know, they say, do I have to pay anything? No, is there any paperwork? No, we'll file it for you. I go, great, hey, this is nice. So that's the idea that there are, I would have no premiums, no copays, no deductibles that it is a universal cradle-to-grave system that you get your card at birth. And we have a fair mechanism for covering the cost. So it's, it's a, and the thing that I think is so great about the Medicare for All, the reason I think it's caught on is because people love their Medicare and now it's been around long enough that everyone knows someone who's, most people know someone who is on Medicare and a lot of people, 62, 63, 64, sort of holding on to get Medicare. So I think again, the rest of the world has figured this out and we'll see if we join the rest of the world on this. Great. Was there one more? Yeah, right there. I'm Kathleen Roemig from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, going back to history. So the 1935 Act excluded domestic and agricultural workers and I've heard two kind of competing theories for why that is. One is structural racism and the other is administrative challenges because there weren't big payrolls to automatically deduct those payroll taxes. So what have you uncovered in your research? Thank you for that question. And first of all, I feel like it was a planted question. And Kathleen, I'm not just saying this, but when I was thinking about Evelyn Burns and talking about the Monique Morrissey of that period, I was actually thinking kind of Kathleen Roemig too. They were sort of the, because Kathleen does fantastic fact sheets and work on these issues. I'm glad you asked that. I think I have about 30 pages of this book or more. I go through this at length because this is a common misunderstanding really among progressives that social security was born in racism. And of course it was a racist time. There's no question it was a racist time but there is a lot of evidence that this is just wrong, including testimony which I cite in the book from the NAACP that really didn't want any part. They wanted a federal means tested program. They didn't even, because most of them didn't think, you had to have an earnings record and in those kinds of jobs it was very hard to have an earnings record. The history basically is that they went back and forth in the Committee on Economic Security and it wasn't just those two groups. They, your professionals were excluded. There were lots of exclusions. It was this point that I ended the talk with that Roosevelt not wanting to start too extravagantly. They, the staff said no. The committee overruled them and said yes we should have it universal. All of the writings that they eventually wanted it universal. It actually came from Secretary Morgenthau at the Ways and Means Committee hearing with Francis Perkins sitting next to him to her shock because he just, he had been running around and he was concerned about the administrative ability. His people in the IRS had said and it was not that long after prohibition and they were worried about scoff laws and all of that. So I think, and I've got, I really go over, really it's about 30 pages going through all kinds of documents including a very excellent piece by the historian of the Social Security Administration making a very clear case about this because what a lot of people confuse, Title I was means tested old age security and that was state run. That was a state federal program and the states were, the southern states were very concerned that the federal government was gonna come in and force because they had some standard of decency and they thought that was gonna be an entering wedge so there was a lot of racism about that and there's a lot of discussion about the racist feelings about that but Title II, it was clear, it was for administrative reasons and if you look at the progressive testimony you look at the NAACP's testimony and to me the absolute clincher is that those domestic and agricultural workers were added in 1950. It's not like that was all of a sudden we were all enlightened of that. I mean that was after the Dixie Crats in 1948 that was clearly a racist time so if that had been blocking it in 1935 that presumably would have blocked it in 1950 but for those who wanted a war as I say there's like chapter four and there's like 30 or 40 pages on it so thank you for that question. So we're just at five o'clock so I know our time at EPI is up as I was told. And I think Nancy might be able to stay around a little bit and answer some questions. Or sign some books. But here's the most important thing I think you should remember from today and that is if we do in fact see a progressive revolution in your words after the reign of Donald J. Trump remember you heard it here first from Nancy Altman. So I hope your prediction is true. And I hope you all come back and celebrate. So please, the books are still on sale out there if you want to get a copy of the book we encourage you to do that but please join me in giving a very warm round of applause to Nancy Altman.